Today’s Twit is the Day victim is Twitter itself, surprisingly enough, after the micro-blogging giant announced it is to impose strict limits on third-party Twitter clients.
With thousands of Twitter clients all benefiting from their own desktop services and apps, Twitter has now changed its terms of service to ensure that any developers that don’t match the site’s high standards will be rejected. Privacy and a high quality experience are now of the utmost importance, as outlined below:
“If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service.”
More worryingly is that rather than third-party clients thinking outside the box and differentiating between themselves and adding to the standard user experience, it is now appears as though developers will limited to essentially improving and elaborating upon the standard Twitter experience.
“Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.”
It’s certainly appears to be a harsh tone that Twitter is adopting, so we would expect the percentage of using only using the official Twitter client (which Twitter rather surprisingly believes to be 90%) to only rise from here.
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